-Unreal gameplay combined with the idea of cover. I have no idea what the hell I'm thinking in doing this.

Story: "We crashed a long time ago. It wasn't necessarily distant, in regards to time, but in history, it was immense. I've lived on this rock for years. I'm still breathing, and I still feel young, but I find myself recounting my first month on this volatile shitter of a planet. A lot happened in that month that I dare not ponder until now, to say the least. But whatever we saw coming, it's happening now, in our lifetimes. Nobody but us saw that and lived through to the end, but we never payed much attention to the disturbing backlogs left behind about the glyphs, just read them in horror and disbelief, and charged our weapons for the firefights at the damned place in a nameless jungle from Hell, putting the rest of it out of our minds as we held off the skaarj. Shit went down, no denying that, but now we're seeing things that don't settle in the pits of our stomachs. And worst of all, everything we've seen since the ignition of the tarydium at the Y'pham caves has been dangerously exact compared the the texts that were recovered on a 'prophecy' which that team had studied and recorded on the logs we found. Most of them contained records with a superstitious undertone; another reason to suspect its logical illegitimacy. But unfortunately for just about everyone here, we've got a full-blown shitstorm brewing, with us at ground zero." -Frances "Franco" Reece, Ex UMS Prisoner 8610

-USM COMMAND LOG: These are a recount of the most notable events of Mister Reece's first month on Na Pali, pieced together from his own testimony and the logs and evidence found from his comrades. Though the location where these events took place is currently unknown, search for said location is still underway. Those logs are, in every way, crucial to the benefit of our control of this sector-

Current plans: Focus on making what cover I can using stock Unreal pawn/trigger/mover/path-system functionality, and what else have you. The location will probably be a temple of some variation, but I'm aiming for multi-dimensional combat of sorts, where the cover that does exist in the map can be dynamic and will change up the gameplay in ways that don't simply make situations easier, but also change up the gameplay in ways that change the situation. So when you engage the cover in your immediate area, the enemy's' advancement will change or you will be attacked by more enemies, etc., as an example. Also, in some cases, you may not need cover at all, but it will help you if you're having trouble with the opposition. In this case, you don't have to make an effort at providing yourself with additional cover before or during a fight, and you'll have the usual pillars and walls to hide behind, but in many cases, you can unlock more areas and vantage/cover points if you look around and dodge to other areas of cover. There will also be moments where you can hinder opponents from reaching your position or positions where your cover becomes useless, but again, it requires some effort. I'll do my best to put together some interesting fights with this. I'm going for layout and then getting this system into the gameplay as best as I can, by adding in enemies and trying them out, then figuring how I can give the player cover from them, and figuring out how much cover they'll have and for how long they'll have it. Misc stuff that I'll have to play around with, definitely, but I'm hoping it will be fun for me and for anyone who plays it.

Last edited by Jet v4.3.5 on 22 Apr 2011, 06:30, edited 3 times in total.

Story has been formulated. The main post now includes the setup of a potential series I might continue. Above, I went with the idea that, since the level content and weapons reflect that of the original Unreal, it would take place in the same time frame, but with a much broader, almost foreshadowing backstory that could eventually lead into a "futuristic"-based pack (think Seven Bullets, for instance). Most of this will stick for this map. Tell me what you think. Hopefully the actual release will be as enjoyable as I intend it to be, since I would like to make a later project based on the sequence of events in the years to come after the events of this specific map.

EDIT: Indeed I did try and draw multiple stair lines while riding in a car. Took this vacation as an oportunity to PWN part of the floorplan of my map. Hopefully, this will be sweet shit. And this is only half of the map, as far as I've planned so far. I'll start on this half in the editor tomorrow hopefully and get some work done on shit. Even if everything else sucks tits, I hope the grandeur of it will classify as at least some low-grade "conceptual grandness", though it's all in concept right now. Best part: I can make terrain externally, so this should be interesting. I'll be culling the shit out of everything so there isn't unnecessary crap everywhere. BSP is a worry, but I'll deal with that when the time comes. I'm really looking forward to trying these ideas out on quickie drive so I can get a good feel of the proposed temple/village idea I've had for this. As for combat and gameplay, I don't know a DAMN thing on how this will turn out, but I'll beat myself up if I have to to get it working well enough by the end of the contest. I won't release until due date even if I think I'm done, just in case I find some more shit. Whatever. Just wish me luck or whatever.

Lots of placeholders at the moment. Torch styles might need variation, so I'm looking at them when I speak of placeholders, but the sky counts as such also. It may look nice, but it was a duplicate of a sky I did in another map that I want to use later on, so I'll change this up a bit later. Time of day stuff is still being worked on, of course, but the idea is that you will have access to one section of the temple for a certain amount of time until you fall into a hole and enter the catacombs or dungeon area of this section of the settlement. When you exit out of there after exploring a little, you'll be greeted by daytime and a hefty assault by the skaarj, which you must dispose of and outsmart all on your lonesome. Still working on some other incomplete and troublesome stuff for the design, but I like this area in particular because it feels the most solid to me, even if it's a bit bare and needs a bit more work.

Just a heads up: this is likely not going to be done by the end of the contest. School/vacations have decreased my time by a little, but the two-week extension helped with that. On the other hand, my hard drive in my main computer is going bad or at least becoming heat-sensitive and it'll be a while before I can use it for working on stuff. I did make a decent amount of progress on the map, but not enough to bridge what time might be left after my hardware is sorted out and the backups are done. I did leave myself an out though: in the future, this may be released in a severely more glorified fashion, but aside that, it's also been set up for an interesting sequel. The concept is good and fresh, and the sequel is open quite a bit to my own interpretation when that time comes. Short-term, I will be doing other things where mapping is concerned, along with modeling on the Red Nemesis front.